Conjure Women Read online

  * * *

  —

  “You still bleedin’, Miss?” Sarah had asked.

  Varina sighed, sunk deeper. The water in the tub scalded at her shoulders. She bade her house girl to make it hotter and hotter still. It was not enough.

  “No. The bleedin’s stopped.”

  “It’s like that for me too sometimes.” The mulatta had dipped her voice low, sharing a secret as if she thought it was something Varina needed. “Like it don’t want to get started. But it always comes.”

  Varina knew it wasn’t going to come, not for her. This was not the start of her monthly courses. This was an end. Varina kept her expression steady, though inside she rocked with shame, with horror. Was that the moment she’d known? She had wished for more blood, known it wasn’t enough somehow. Knew that it meant one way or the other that something was wrong. She was wrong. She’d skipped something important in her life. Gone from child to woman, violently.

  “Ain’t the water too hot, Miss?” Sarah warned.

  In the tub Varina let her body slip down and down. Slowly. Inch by boiling inch, then she let her face sink down too and watched the strange quivering way her curls floated up above her, stretched in their effort to stay at the surface. She watched bubbles flutter from her nose and mouth. They called to her dimming mind a memory of the moths she’d chased through the yard sometime in those endless dragging days of her youth. She’d never caught a single one, had she?

  Sarah yanked her upward by the arms so forcefully that half the water gushed out to splatter on the wood floor. Varina drew in air in desperate clumps and the mulatta hissed at her and Varina watched Sarah’s big pretty brown eyes go wide with panic as their two hearts pounded, and then go wider still when she realized she was still gripping onto a white woman’s arms with enough desperation to bruise. She let go.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know,” Varina had said. But she did know.

  They both seemed to recall themselves in the same moment. Varina wicked the wet from her eyes. Sarah began to clean the puddles on the floor. When she was done, she stood and stared down at Varina, which was a thing she should have known better than to do, and Varina would have told her so. Would have scolded her and screamed. But Varina couldn’t draw the breath.

  “Can I help you outta there now, Miss Varina?” Sarah spoke like she was bargaining with a stubborn child.

  “No,” Varina said, the one word harsh and terrible. She couldn’t bear the thought of being touched again.

  * * *

  —

  Her daddy took to wearing that old dusty uniform, relic of another war, marched around the house planning a one-man campaign against the Yankees, saying how the youngbloods nowadays didn’t know how to fight, had no pride in the things they were fighting for, and that was why they were losing. He’d told her of the offer of marriage as an afterthought, not even looking at her. Not even seeing.

  Varina hadn’t cared. Not about her daddy’s hurt that he was too old to fight at the front line. Not about pride, or tradition, or ways of life. She cared about her one life and tried to ignore the new one gurgling inside her. The sooner the husband came the better. Maybe she could tell of it then. Maybe she could love it. Take pride in it. Give it a name.

  She couldn’t say when she first felt it move, only that it felt like moth’s wings in the dip of her stomach, a sensation so strange and small it seemed like something she’d made happen by half-wishing that it would. There was so much half-wishing then when her daddy had showed her the tin countenance of the man she was to marry. A man she’d danced with only once. Hard and fast and rough and alone, a dance to no music or at least no type that she had ever imagined to hear in her life. No time for courting in wartime, he’d told her, and no time to be so shy. Varina had never been shy a moment in her life ’til then, ’til a man, a supposed-to-be-beau, had ripped up her dress and made her shy of everything, shy of her own reflection in the glass, shy of a flutter in the bottom of her stomach that should have been a good thing. Her life should have been a good thing, but there was a war to the north and there were explosions in the sky and the first time she felt it kick, really kick, it had been a musket shot come from her insides so hot and hard, she’d half-wished she were dead.

  * * *

  —

  Varina asked for them for comfort, her two little nigras. She’d take them with her right to her marriage bed if she could, like a beloved childhood blanket to stick between her and her new husband, a moth-eaten shield. But Varina wasn’t stupid; in fact, she felt smarter as she grew fatter, like she was filling up with a sharper, keener knowledge.

  Varina knew what she saw when she looked at that mulatta girl, Sarah, and it was something like seeing her own face looking back up at her, distorted only by a ripple in the pond. Sarah was darker than Varina; that mark of Cain left by a dead black mother made them only half sisters, but if not for that they might have been twins.

  Her daddy, Varina realized, was a dirty man. The fact did not surprise her like it ought to. She’d lately been introduced to the dirtiness of men, was growing heavy with it. And if she were to pack up Sarah and take her as her double, it would be all the sweeter that she might send Sarah out to her husband, a soldier for proxy.

  * * *

  —

  “How long this been goin’ on?” Rue asked.

  Varina had stripped herself down to next to nothing. Had ruined her room. Had smacked Rue across the face with a parasol handle. Dully Varina marveled at the red raising up on the nigra’s cheek even through the black, a perfect line of the parasol.

  The beads off of Varina’s broken belt were still rolling. She could hear them reaching the far corners of her bedroom. Spinning. Under her bed and vanity, bouncing off the walls and edges and corners and still spinning. What would it take to make them come to rest? Varina didn’t have an answer to Rue’s question. To her it had felt like a lifetime that she had been nursing her shameful secret.

  PROMISE

  His word. It was all Rue had. Bruh Abel kept saying, Girl, you have my word. She did not want his word or anything his.

  “The baby come dead,” he said. He said it slow each time, careful, like this was the first time she was hearing it.

  Spat on the floor and said to him, “I don’t believe you.”

  He cut her nails for her because he thought he was being kind.

  “Used to do this for Queenie,” he said of his mama, trying to make Rue smile. “Toes too.”

  She did not want to think of Bruh Abel’s mama, she did not want to think of him as coming from a mama who was real, and anyway Queenie did not feel real. She waxed and waned in each story, first kind then cruel, first brilliant then flawed. Rue had it hard enough trying to believe him. So why did he keep trying to pile on more lies?

  She wanted to take herself to the field, told Bruh Abel she was going to go look for some sort of quiet and he ought not to follow her. He didn’t want to let her go off alone, that much she could tell from the way his eyes roved over her. He was trying to figure if she could be trusted by herself.

  “Stay here,” he said.

  He blamed it on the danger that was thrumming through the town, the fear of the newly come whites lurking around, scheming to take their Promised Land, looking vengeful of it. But Rue knew what Bruh Abel was fearing. Rue’s worst threats had always come from within her own self. She could find death in the weeds. It had always impressed her how many things could harm you just by being eaten wrongly. How many things could kill.

  “It’s the plant’s defense against predators,” Miss May Belle had explained once. That answer didn’t satisfy.

  “It’s too late to be poison,” Rue had argued. “If you already bein’ eaten.”

  Miss May Belle had laughed at that and said no more.

  Rue was not even
shamed by the thought that occurred to her, which was to put Bruh Abel to sleep so she could slip free of him. She could give him something she could trust in. Lavender or valerian or lemon balm; she mixed a poison for him in her head. In the end he did it to himself. He placed the bottle of label-less liquor on the table between them as though it were a solution.

  “Drink,” he said. Maybe his mind was working the same way hers was. Thinking near fondly on the time he’d first wiled his way into her home. She had meant to slip free of him then in much the same way but couldn’t work it. She had tried to trick him and he had tried to trick her and the two of them had known each other for what they were. Liars. She could’ve almost felt nostalgic after it, if it hadn’t all ended up so bitter.

  Rue got up from the table. Fetched two cups and ignored the pull of the stitches on her stomach as she moved. The ache of the healing wound centered from the deep cut where Bruh Abel had told her they’d taken her baby out. She didn’t like to think on it, being laid open by the Quaker doctor. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Rue set the cups down hard on the table in front of Bruh Abel.

  Miss May Belle had used to say that you ought to pour in drink if you wanted to pour out truth. So, his cup she filled to near the brim and did the same to her own.

  He took a sip and she watched to see that he swallowed it. She sipped, and he did the same. They watched each other, wary as any two creatures that knew they were well matched.

  “Queenie lost her last child,” he said.

  It wasn’t like Bruh Abel to start one of his tales in such an unfanciful way, to lay down the bare bones of a thing without a careful, purposeful arrangement of false skin to dress it up. No preamble here, no magic.

  “I thought you was her last.”

  He shook his head. Rue took a sip and listened.

  “Was after me. I was little then. I watched, though I wasn’t supposed to. No men in the birthin’ room was what folks used to say back then.”

  “Bad luck.” Rue touched her stomach. Sipped. That wasn’t true. It was just something folks said. Something Miss May Belle had used to say: “Where d’you think Adam was when Eve brung out Cain and Abel?”

  “I was scared,” Bruh Abel said.

  She blinked at him. For a moment she forgot what time he was speaking on. She was all mixed up; the present was the past come again.

  “I hear my mama screamin’,” Bruh Abel said. “I loved her more than anythin’ then. I didn’t understand it. I thought they was killin’ her, them strange doctorin’ grandmamas that come. Them two crones who’d rid themselves of their menfolk and lived together in a one-bed cabin. Folks whispered about ’em as much as they relied on ’em.

  “Queenie, laborin’, was hollerin’ somethin’ awful when they laid her down. Me, a child, I thought, ‘I’m the only one that can stop it. I’m the only one.’ ”

  Bruh Abel could weave a tale, Rue knew, and she shut her eyes to see it, this birth, unremarkable as all the ones any woman had ever suffered before and after. But Bruh Abel transfigured it, made it sound so terrifying, his mama there sat up in bed and a pair of old prune-black women at either of her fat ankles, her dress shucked up to her thighs, her toes writhing round the ends of the metal bedpost—all that Abel could see from his vantage point.

  He paused in the telling to take a long sip, like he was pushing something down. “I don’t know how y’all women do it.”

  “I don’t know either.”

  He was deep in his drink by now, drooping across the table already. He’d fall asleep soon, like she’d been after. Now the story wanted finishing.

  “What happened to her baby?”

  “Come dead.” She held back on hitting him. For telling this story of all stories. But she felt too sluggish and too sick and too defeated.

  “I seen him, though.” Bruh Abel’s voice grew thin. “Before they named him a lost cause. The baby. He was as strange a li’l thing as ever there was. Blue all over. So pale he was, it seemed strange to think he’d come from my mama, who was big and dark. But she was his mama alright.”

  “ ’Course she was.” Rue was growing fed up. “He come out a’ her. Ain’t no question a’ origin to be had there.”

  “What it was, though, was his skin,” he ventured quietly.

  “They had the same colorin’?” It always seemed to come down to a matter of coloring.

  Bruh Abel scoffed, polished his glass to empty. “Not hardly. Queenie was dark as the night is. This baby boy was lighter even than me.”

  Rue tried to remember what she knew of Queenie, could recall only that she’d been the figurehead on her master’s boat, every detail of her fecund body chiseled out as a mahogany mermaid, the whole of the boat patterned as her flipper tail.

  “So what then?” Rue asked.

  “The baby was light enough to be white; that’s why it looked so vivid on him and was nothin’ on her.” He touched his own smooth arm. “A birthmark maybe. All up the body.”

  “What it look like?”

  “Looked something,” Bruh Abel said, “like scales.”

  There were so many sights in the world that Rue hadn’t ever seen. But what she had seen, once, was the birth of a shock-white baby with ochre black eyes. Sarah’s baby, born in a caul and covered all in a birthmark that looked like scales. Just like Queenie’s lost boy.

  Bruh Abel had no birthmark that Rue had ever seen, but she understood now that that was how it worked sometimes. The past revealed itself in mysterious ways, and Bruh Abel it seemed had passed his mama’s brand onto his own son. Bean.

  Maybe Rue’s girl would have had the same birthmark had she lived.

  * * *

  —

  Posy, half-born and half-remembered. Rue could almost see her baby. The new dark skin, still wet. The wanting O of her little mouth, suckling at the empty air. If Posy had not been real, then nothing was.

  Rue’s body remembered. Inside, her muscles still ached, caught in a suspended spasm, still pushing. Her arms and fingers remembered that soft feel of baby, rich and butter smooth as flower petals. Did all babies feel that sweet, and she had never known it? She didn’t wish to touch another to find out.

  What was it she thought she’d find out there in that wilderness besides singed earth and bark, same as ever? The clearing in which she’d held Posy was one from her memory, lusher, greener probably than it had been even before the war. Fertile, the way only the land in wistful memory could be. Fool she was, did she think she’d see Varina there waiting? Proud of the predictable childish trick she’d pulled—Here’s your doll baby, Rue.

  Rue had loved that stretch of empty green once, for how solitary it was. Now she felt that she’d never be alone again, that she’d be alone all her life. The shed still stood with that usual crooked perseverance at the river’s edge. It was in that place that she’d found Bruh Abel, hiding from the Ravaging, the scores of dead babies. She had told him then to come into town, give the mamas balm in the form of lies.

  “My baby come dead,” Rue tried saying it aloud.

  * * *

  —

  She was bleeding. Down below and from the neat gash in her stomach. The liquor she’d shared with Bruh Abel had made her blood rush. There was one more place still to look. Rue could have walked through those woods with her eyes closed, might have sleepwalked there, for before she knew what was what, she was tumbling through the church’s double doors, expecting to be scolded by white parishioners. It was empty as always, the ground torn up, the grass poking through the old wood floor a harsh reminder of time. The woods were trying to take the space back, chew up the bricks and spit them out crooked.

  Rue came to a rest on a bench in the old white folks’ section, cleared a cobweb off with her hands and laid herself down across it. The high white ceiling of the church was going dim on its edges. She put p
ressure to her bleeding. She could feel her heart beating under her hand.

  “You listenin’?” Rue screamed or whispered. It was the way she knew to summon her haint.

  “What’s happened to you?”

  Rue could taste blood in her mouth, metallic and tangy. There was no way of knowing if she’d bit her tongue or brought it up hot from her stomach.

  “Did you take her?” Rue asked.

  Varina swam into her vision. She looked pale and troubled. Not at all like she’d been in Rue’s dream.

  Here, alive, she was a grown woman made small by the cavern of the church. Her hair was turning muted at the roots. She looked more like her daddy than she ever had. Varina sat down on the bench beside her, and Rue felt the wood shift beneath her back for the added weight. Varina’s hands hesitated over her, unsure how to help but twitching with the urge to, little birds hovering, looking to perch.

  “Rue. You’re bleedin’.”

  “Did you take her?”

  “Take who?” The worry lines lately etched in her forehead deepened. “Rue, you ain’t makin’ a lick of sense. Here, let me help you.”

  Varina fussed at her, tried to make her sit, but the incision at her stomach set Rue screaming.

  “Where’s my baby?”

  “That li’l boy with the eyes?” Varina frowned. “I only meant to watch over him.”

  Varina made to get up but Rue caught her arm, sunk her jagged clipped nails into the thin flesh, felt the bone roll beneath the skin as Varina struggled to move away from her.